The President Who Cried "Wolf!"

Here's the problem with "lying" or fudging the truth when you are President of the United States. Once you are
caught in a lie -- particularly about national security issues -- who can ever believe you again?

It's like the boy who cried
"Wolf!" one too many times, and the townspeople would not believe him when the
wolf truly was at the door. President Bush's lies about the WMDs now make it
impossible for most of us to believe him or anyone in his cabinet when they try
to call attention to potential
danger.

The fact that Bush lied -- or at
the very least distorted reality -- in order to persuade Americans that they had
no choice but to go to war with Iraq has made suspect any future claims of
danger -- no matter how real those claims may
be.

Yesterday Attorney General John
Ashcroft claimed that the United States could be the target of a major terrorist
threat some time this summer. As is clear from a
New York
Times href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/27/politics/27terror.html?th">article
today, there are a lot of people who question the reasons for Ashcroft's warning
-- including people (apparently) in the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. It appears to be a
ploy to distract Americans from Bush's downward ratings spiral.

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one
questioning this so-called threat.

The
problem is, every time the Bush administration pulls a stunt like this, its
credibility sinks lower and lower. And that is bound to put this country into
serious danger. Because when the
real
threat comes, nobody will believe the administration until after the
fact.

And then people will wonder whether
the administration actually staged the
attack.

The act of lying to the American
public about national security threats by a highly placed Administration
official -- or even merely distorting the
truth -- ought to be a treasonous (and therefore
impeachable) offense ... because those lies put us in greater danger.

President Bush and his cabinet will
never be
able to restore credibility to his administration. That is why, regardless of
your political persuasion, patriotism requires that you turn them all out of
office.

Our national security depends on
it.